Witness the race of four powerful cooling solutions from Titan, Thermaltake and Zalman in our new round of tests. Find out if the newcomer from Zalman with its unique heatsink design can compete with the rivals.

Well, since we discussed the Zalman cooler in great detail already, we would only like to show you its picture inside our testbed:

In the dark the LED’s of the cooler look even more beautiful, however, against the background of two Sharkoon Luminous Blue LED fans Zalman CNPS9500 LED looks quite modest, I should say:

As we can see, I managed to turn Zalman CNPS9500 LED so that the air flow could be directed towards the case fan. In order to turn the fastening bracket in the appropriate way, you need to slightly push up the lower heatsink fins. In this case you will easily mount the cooler in any way irrespective of the fastening holes location around Socket 754/939/940.

Besides the coolers listed in the table above, we have also included the performance results for the regular boxed cooler supplied with AMD Athlon 64 (Socket 939) processors. Here are a few photos to remind you what this baby looks like:

The fan of this cooling device can rotate at speeds between ~3,000rpm and ~4,800rpm depending on the CPU temperature (it wouldn’t rotate any faster in our testbed). The generated noise is pretty loud.

Let’s take a look at the testbed configuration before we pass over to analyzing the obtained performance results. Especially, since there have been a few important changes in our testing approach that are worth mentioning.